Devices for the promotion of safety and security of persons and property are well known. The most common of these devices is an automobile alarm. The automobile alarm is used to monitor the opening of doors and sound an alarm if the device has not been disabled. There are other security devices which are utilized during normal business hours to monitor computer tasks running on a work station and place alert calls when a job within a task has been completed or fails. In the past and into the present time there has been an increased emphasis on safety of a house or an office, particularly in the absence of people living or working therein.
A Stillwell U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,291, discloses a system for annunciating emergencies. As disclosed, a system that can monitor occupied or unoccupied buildings and annunciate to a distant point, e.g. a digital pocket pager, emergency events such as burglaries, fires, high or low temperature, high or low flow rate in such devices such as boilers and many more. The system has a circuit that makes interfacing with most commercial field detectors especially easy, and a circuit that enables the system to easily access telephone lines, so as to transmit annunciation messages.
Notwithstanding the above, it is presently believed that there may be a market for an alarm system which uses inherent capabilities of presently available commercial telephone sets for identifying the kind of emergency in an environment, such as home or office, and reporting such emergency events to places distant from the event for quick and appropriate response. It is believed that there may be a market for this alarm system because, the alarm system can be used in parallel with the presently available commercial telephone sets, such that, the telephone can be used normally during the period when no emergency events occur.